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“Cloud is probably one of the most nebulous terms in the industry now,” said
Chris Cummings, NetApp’s vice president of product and solutions marketing. “It’s still confusing
because the industry hasn’t done a particularly good job of making it clear what to do to enable
the cloud. We want to make it much more concrete. The industry owes [users] a better answer.”

NetApp is expanding its OnCommand SRM software to add technology from its January Akorri Networks acquisition. OnCommand Insight, based on Akorri, provides
service analytics and monitoring to virtual machines (VMs) and storage. It plugs into the new
NetApp OnCommand unified manager, which can be used to manage all OnCommand
applications.

“We’re not trying to win the single pane-of-glass war,” Cummings said. “We want to have these
integrated with a broader range of tools in the infrastructure.”

What makes the new software cloud-friendly? Cummings said OnCommand Insight lets customers
analyze and automate shared storage used in the cloud. For example, customers can move virtual
machines within the cloud and let policies follow it and set up self-service portals for end users
with OnCommand’s unified management.

“You can’t just talk about virtualization for the cloud, you also have to have automation,” he
said.

HDS' UCP consolidates server, storage and network management into one system: HDS’ version of
Cisco’s UCS and Hewlett-Packard’s BladeSystem Matrix. Linda Xu, senior director for file,
content and cloud services at HDS, called UCP “the glue that ties it together.” The Compute Blade
provides much of the stacks’ cloud capabilities.

The Compute Blade supports HDS’ logical partition technology (LPAR) that lets enterprises and
cloud providers divide compute resources and puts virtualization into the hardware. Hitachi Compute
Blade enables customers to have selected blades running LPARs next to other blades, Microsoft
Hyper-V or VMware, all in the same chassis.

“This is for cloud providers and enterprises who want to build their own cloud,” Xu said.
“They can take this and add pay-per-use capabilities or a service portal on top.”

Like NetApp's Cummings, Xu said automation is a key to enabling storage clouds. “It’s a new phenomenon in the data center,” she said. “You
need end-to-end automation across technology boundaries.”